Course content
The lab is conceptualized into five units, which are thematically organized as follows:
Unit 1
- Sensors, Microcontroller & Linux basics
- The students gain basic experience with the working environment of the lab, including mastering of Linux command line on a Rasberry Pi, or using NodeMCU command line to uploading programs on a microcontroller, or interfacing with sensors.
Unit 2
- Basics of Network and Networking Protocols
- The students learn how to connect their microcontrollers/sensors to a network, including connection to WiFi access points, ping of a microcontroller from the Raspberry Pi, uploading a program that acts as a TCP client and connect it to a netcat server.
Unit 3
- MQTT Protocol
- The students learn about the broker based publish/subscribe structure of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT) and how to use it to connect devices. For instance, in this lab the students program the microcontroller with attached sensor to publish the sensor output to a MQTT topic.
Unit 4
- Local Data Processing (Fog Computing)
- The students learn about the benefits of decoupling the acquisition, processing and usage of sensor data from the devices generating and using this data, which is enabled through networking the devices in the given setup. For instance, by networking devices of NodeMCU, sensors, smart phones and Rasberry Pis, a fog computing zone can be created for smart data processing with various application scenarios.
Unit 5
- Remote Data Processing (Cloud Computing)
- The students learn about the concept of cloud, and how the previously engineered system can connect to a cloud for remote data processing and usage. To this end, the emphasis of this unit is on application layer protocols http REST, with examples of adding blocks to students‘ previously engineered setups to forward data to the „fog“ and "cloud" using HTTP+REST.
